MONTHLY KETCHUP-DATE: OHTANI 50TH TO HIT 15+ HRs IN A MONTH

 WE told you back on May 20th that Shohei Ohtani was on pace to hit at least 15 homers in May...

...and Friday night (5/30), when the Dodgers hosted the Yankees in LA for what turned into an eerie echo of their last meeting (Game 5 of last year's World Series), Sho-time answered a first-inning homer from Aaron Judge and hit another later in the game as the Bronx Bombahs blew a 5-1 lead, winding up as 8-5 losers. (Judge hit two homers in today's game, but those were the only runs the Yankees managed in what quickly became a frightful rout, thanks in large part to a 7-RBI game from Max Muncy. Final score: Dodgers 18, Bombed-Out Bronxsters 2.)

BUT we digress...the two homers on Friday night made it exactly 15 in May for Ohtani, making him (as it says in the headline above...) into the 50th instance of this still-rare feat. He was also the 49th such "event", achieved in June 2023. 

He is the first player to have adjacent events on the list since Mark McGwire did so in 1998-99. Of course, he's still behind Big Mac's total of five 15+ homer months, Babe Ruth's total of four, and Hank Greenberg's hat trick. (These can all be viewed at that May 20th blog post, along with the other sluggers to have two 15+ HR months, Rudy York, Albert Belle, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds.)

HERE is the updated list for the 21st-century portion of this (now) 50-strong 15+ homer in a month fraternity...

Those stat totals aren't updated to include Ohtani's performance in today's game, but we'll do so with all deliberate speed just in case he does this again in June. (After all, as we've mentioned previously, June has been Ohtani's best month, as that stat line from June 2023 above will attest.)

We will pull out the ketchup bottle for more monthlies while we await the next tsunami from Sho-Time...

MONTHLY KETCHUP CONTINUED: 10+ DOUBLES IN A MONTH...

WE expand your horizons...or perhaps we'll just be expanding the amount of data you'll be seeing: we'll let you decide.

The first "monthlies" we've showed you focused on the rarefied achievements: 49 instances of 15+ homers in a month; 114 occurrences of 15 doubles in a month. But we told you we'd be expanding from that, eventually providing a tabular guide to the frequency distributions of each event level.

So to start that off, we will tell you (rather that show you just yet) that there are 1307 instances of 10+ homers-in-a-month--from Babe Ruth in 1920 to Aaron Judge, Cal Raleigh and Eugenio Suarez in 2025.

That's a lot of 10+ HR months, actually, and we'll show you the TimeGrid™ chart for that in a subsequent post. Right now, however, we want you to focus on the ratio between 15+ HR months (just 49, remember) and 10+ homer months (1307). That's just under 27 times as many 10+ HR homer months: if we use that "multiplier" to extrapolate how many 10+ double months there are compared to 15+ double months, we get a total of just a few more than 3000 instances since 1901. 

AND how does estimate stack up with reality? See the TimeGrid™ (at left) for the answer,

As always, this display provides its version of the essential offensive history of the game, from the descent into the Deadball Era, the sharp uptick in all kinds of hitting with the one-two punch of the lively ball and Babe Ruth, followed by the "golden age of doubles." Then: doubles decay as homers and strikeouts begin their inevitable incursion on the overall balance of the game, with an offensive explosion in the nineties that ushers in a renaissance for the double, which sustains itself for fifteen years until we enter our present "sine-wave" era, where the two-base hit became a careening pinball in an entropic game where the angle of the pinball machine kept shifting until it was tilted both vertically and horizontally at the same time, narrowing the range for the double as the ability to hit for batting average continued to decay.

The 2020s might just see a drop in "10 doubles a month" incidences that is almost as dramatic as what occurred in the 1940s, which led to a half-century drought. At the moment, doubles per game in the AL is at a level (1.5 per game) that's the lowest it's been since 1989. 

But we'll always have that great fin de siecle explosion to wax nostalgic about, right? Well, only partially: keep in mind that the raw numbers we've displayed above don't tell the whole story--we need to adjust that data by the number of teams in MLB. We need to acknowledge that  70 "10+ doubles-per-month" incidences in 1930 (with 16 total teams) are not the same as the 70 occurring in 2009 (with 30 teams). In order to see the true levels, we must adjust the raw numbers to a common scale, which is "average number of 10+ doubles in month incidences per team in any given year."

When we make that adjustment, we see that the "incidence uptick" during the offensive explosion--while still a serious uplift from a very long fallow period--actually pales in comparison to what happened between 1925-1940.

The "heat map" approach in the TimeGrid™ provides us with an easy visual clue regarding whether we're in a "drought" period for doubles. We're not quite there yet, but when 2025 is in the books, there's a good chance that we will be...

Hitting 10 doubles in a month might not sound like much of an accomplishment, given that it's happened nearly four thousand times. But remember that such a pace, if sustained over a season, would result in 60 doubles for the year. Hitting that many doubles in a season has happened only six times--five of them in the 1930s. It hasn't happened since 1936--three 21st century hitters have come close: 59 for Todd Helton (2000) and Freddie Freeman (2023); 58 for Nick Castellanos (2019)--but those look like anomalies in a time frame when doubles are clearly in decline.

LET's close with two quizzes. 1) Just who are those six hitters with 60+ 2Bs in a season, anyway? If you read assiduously here, you'll know that the name of the record holder (Earl Webb, with 67 in 1931), because we mention him occasionally (he and Owen "Chief" Wilson, the triples record holder, are the two great unknowns in the so-called "marquee records"). But who are the other five? We mentioned one of them--Paul Waner (63 in 1932)--in our last post. But would you have guessed that Hank Greenberg (63 in 1934) was one of them? Possibly only Gracie Allen knows (or at least used to know...) that her husband  George Burns hit 64 doubles in 1926 to briefly hold the record ("so that's where he was all those months!" she exclaimed). 

That leaves the two hitters who did it in the same season (1936)--Charlie Gehringer (60) and Joe Medwick (64), apparently creating a "curse of the double" which foiled both Freeman and Helton (how many times did each of them get thrown out at second trying to stretch a single into a double?). 

2) It has finally dawned on us that the TimeGrid™ can function as a quiz...if you just leave off the title on the chart. 

And so that's just what we've done with this one (at right). Your mission (if you choose to accept it...) is to figure out just what this time sequence of numbers is actually describing. 

We realize that such a quiz is 99.9% hopeless without a clue, so we will take pity on you and provide one. And we'll be uncharacteristically succinct when we do so--it's a rate stat.

(Oh, and yes it's a month stat, as you can see.)

The heat map pattern here is similar to the 10-doubles-per-month, except the total number of incidences is a great deal lower, and the uptick in recent years is not so strong. 

We'll tease this one again in the series, and overlay some other info into the TimeGrid™ to give you a fighting chance...stay tuned!

CATCHING UP WITH THE MONTHLIES: 15+ DOUBLES IN A MONTH...

GETTING back on track for what we're tracking as we chase down the never-discussed, so-unknown-they're-not-even-dismissed-out-of-hand "most in a month" statistics...sometimes you just have to give in to your impulses, n'est-ce pas? (And let's face it: what these stats convey are legitimate micro-extremes, as opposed to the faux-phenomenology of a Sam Miller, currently in the mode of counting inchoate, involuted baseball "things" that actually become more ephemeral when counted...which is a project that's refreshing and harrowing all at once.)

What we count here won't change theories/explanations about how teams win, or zero in on which players are "the best," or produce one iota of predictive utility. We will, however, gain an understanding of the relative scarcity or plenitude of various peak performances, captured at a level where significant statistical separation is still visible. 

At the end of all this, we'll provide a guide to the "frequency distribution" of all these "monthlies" we'll keep plucking from Forman et soeur. It may be useful, or it might prove to be as gauzily surreal as what Sam is doing. If we're lucky, it will be both...

SO remember that we found a total of 49 instances of 15+ home runs hit in a month. We're not going to find 15 triples hit in a month by any single individual, so we will leave that in abeyance and move on to doubles (which are at last glance are still more plentiful than home runs in the current game). The ratio of doubles-to-homers over the full ripeness of time in MLB since the introduction of the lively ball is about 1.8 to 1. (Of course, it's lower that that over the past fifteen years; but since we're looking at all of the incidences of "x number of events in a calendar month" and we look for those all the way back to 1901, we can use the 1.8  to 1 ratio to predict how many times someone has hit 15+ doubles in a month.)

Thus: 49 instances of 15+ homers in a month times 1.8 gives us a rough estimate of 85-90 instances of 15+ doubles in a month. How well does that hold up when we look at the TimeGrid™ chart?

As you can see (at right), the estimate is on the low side (by about 20%). The actual number of 15+ doubles in a month instances since 1901 is 114. Some of this is likely due to the clustering effect that's visible in the TimeGrid™: the "golden age" of doubles in the 1930s seems to have produced an outsized number of monthly peaks, possibly aided by the nature of the baseball schedule at that time, with its truncated April "balanced" by extra games in June, July and August. Still, it's interesting that we had a recent year (2023) with another uptick in "monthly peaks, something that didn't manifest in the odd-year offensive spikes that occurred in 2017, 2019 and 2021.

NOTE we haven't mentioned the actual record for most doubles in a month...if they are a good bit more plentiful than homers, does it stand to reason that the record-setting number will be significantly higher than the single-month record for homers (20, held by Sammy Sosa)?

It might stand to reason, but the actual results simply do no bear that out. The record for doubles in a month is, oddly, exactly the same as the record for homers in a month. As you peruse the partial list below (the 33 times hitters have hit 17+ 2Bs in a month...) you'll run across the record-holder...

That is correct: the record (20 doubles in a month) is held by Paul Waner in 1932, a record that has stood for more than ninety years. (Waner is also one of just four hitters with 17+ 2Bs in a month to have hit zero homers in the month where--for these hitters, at least--it was raining doubles. The other three? Joe Dugan, in 1920; Kiki Cuyler, in 1930; and George Kell, in 1950.

Waner's total is particularly impressive because he played in fewer games during his big two-bagger month: those 20 doubles came in just 25 games in May 1932. If "Big Poison" could've maintained that pace, he would have hit...wait for it...123 doubles in the 154-game schedule used at that time. (Earl Webb, the Red Sox outfielder who'd hit 18 doubles in July of the previous year, had set what remains the record for the most doubles in a season, with 67...clearly, record-setting performances were created with the help of these "beyond peak" stretches within a season, a phenomenon we could call "career months." It's a circumstance we could document by listing the seasonal total of doubles for many/most of the players on the above list alongside these "beyond peak" "career months"--and maybe we'll do just that in a little while: stay tuned...)

But, for now, note that 24 of these 33 "beyond peak" performances showcasing the pinnacle of monthly doubles feature batting averages higher than .350; the same number--which is just under 75% of the entries in the chart--also have OPS values in excess of 1.000. That's a heady level of performance for a collection of months where the 23 of the 33 stat lines include home run totals that are minuscule by our post-modern standards, ranging in that slice from 0 to 2....needless to say, that's a far cry from what we saw in our last examination of "peak" (15+ homers in a month).

It's here where those of us with a nostalgic desire for the "high batting average" period of the game that flourished most consistently from 1920-1941 can access that particular performance shape, which was still a vibrant memory in the early 1970s, when a gaggle of semi-shiftless college kids in St. Louis gathered round to create their own set of baseball myths--and were marked for life by its meaning--one that was inexorably eroding away even as we celebrated it. Such shapes live on only in these sub-seasonal snippets, and we celebrate the "throwback moments" that still occasionally occur, such as Freddie Freeman's stat line in May 2023, en route to his 59 doubles for the season--a number that, in the present day, is simultaneously wondrous and irrelevant...

Interesting, though, that despite the vast difference with respect to the sense/shape/aura of offense that doubles and homers embody, their supreme achievements, both in terms of the season as a whole and its monthly accumulations, would be so similar in nature (20 each for a month, high 60s/low 70s for a season). Feel free to ponder that as we get ready to go further down the rabbit hole with "monthlies"...

CATCHING UP WITH THE MONTHLIES: OOPS! 15+ HOMERS IN A MONTH...

OK, so we misspoke...but when does habit become tradition? Or heartbreak become psoriasis?!

We need to up the ante on homers here, just one more time, before we move on to the "lesser" stuff. 

It's all part of an increasingly unescapable fascination with this "in a month" measurement: when does a calendar become a curse? Or vice-versa? 

WHAT it's about is the relative scarcity of certain events...we aren't quite as far gone as Jayson Stark, down in the reedy weeds of this has never happened before! (and Jayson, you really need to compile a book about all of those singularities before the men in the white coats tap you on the shoulder and crook their fingers at you)...but perhaps it's really worse, much worse. (Someone will write a PhD thesis about this, and will be "rewarded" by being named general manager of the Colorado Rockies.)

This could be a Sumimoto sister...but we're not telling!

That's right: relative scarcity. Occurring naturally, without the idiotic imposition of tariffs, or the latest variation in planned obsolescence. We don't want to be able to count it on the fingers of one or two hands, but we don't want to have to bring a wheelbarrow with us, either. Just two or three figures worth (maybe those saucy Sumimoto sisters and one of their disposable frisky friends, frolicking in ways that will get us--not them--arrested: after all, that's why pseudonyms were invented.)

OK, enough foreplay. We're on the other side of the orgasm, in the home run trot, and as our flushed face fades back to its customary semi-pasty shade, we remind you of those posts we reminded you of last time: the 10+ homers in a month material...it's all interesting and all that, but there are more than 999 instances of it, thanks to the offensive explosion and its decadent "launch angle" aftermath (hmm...seems like everything is becoming vaguely pornographic now...sign of the times, apparently). 

So before we totally exhaust your attention span, here's the wrinkle (in case you didn't read the title before plunging in here). We know that there are over 1300 instances of hitters slugging 10 or more HRs in a month. For all of you inveterate carnivores out there, that's not even medium rare. But what about 15 or more HRs in a month? How often does that happen? Could it be in the sweet spot we're looking for--not gonzo Starkian in singularity, but not so proliferate that it won't burn the house down if you accidentally set it on fire? 

DO you remember how many times hitters have hit 50 homers? It's right at the spot where it should stop for all time (though, sadly, it won't)--it's happened exactly 50 times. Thus it's a record that has reached its perfect symmetry. It happened last year (one of the few good things that happened last year), thanks to Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. And one of those two will quite probably destroy that symmetry this year...

But there's another HR feat that's in the same neighborhood: four dozen instances of four-baggers...not quite as perfect a construct, but you've got to go with what they give you. Yes, yes, it's that 15 homers-in-a-month thing--we admit it, already! It has happened just 49 times, just the right amount to carry in a Sumimoto sister handbag. (And don't get too grabby with that one sister: she's got a black belt.)

15+ homer months have a convenient caesura that permits us to divide them, like all Gaul, into two parts. Here are the first 22 instances, from 1923 to 1968:

The relatively unknown Cy Williams was the first to do it, a surprising discovery when one considers the two 50+ HR seasons turned by Babe Ruth in 1920-21. Of course, later in the 20s Ruth would turn the 15+ a month thing into an annual occurrence (1927-30), including the 17 he hit in '27 to hit that magic round number (60) that is much lamented for having been surpassed by a pack of panting hyenas during the end times.

We single out Joltin' Joe for his proliferation of extra-base hits--the only such player to have more doubles and triples than homers in a 15+ HR month. (OK, Jayson, there's your singularity!) Some of you knew that Rudy York slipped past the Babe with 18 HRs in a month in 1937, but did you know that he hit 17 in August 1943, when the balata ball was something less than buoyant and bouncy?

It's true that these "big fly months" are light on other extra-base hits: our 22 instances here produced 342 homers, but only 120 doubles and just 22 triples. (This ratio will be even more pronounced in Part Two...)

Props to Hank Greenberg for his three entries on the list--including his "tandem" tateration with Harlond Clift, making those two the second to have 15+ HR months in the same year. (Joe and Rudy were the first to do so, the year before.) It happens again in 1956, with Mickey Mantle and Joe Adcock, and a fourth time with Roger Maris and Jim Gentile in 1961.

And it's a nice surprise to see Frank Howard (in his "Capital Punisher" incarnation...) produce a 15-HR month in 1968, proving that pitchers during the "year of the pitcher" did sometimes suffer the truth of consequences...

HERE's part two, picking up in the 1980s...

Of our 27 instances from 1985-2023, five of them belong to Mark McGwire, who becomes the first to have two 15+ homers months in the same season (in 1998, of course). It seems that in order to hit 70+ HRs in a season, such a double-up in monthly HR hitting is necessary--and, sure enough, Barry Bonds did the same when he hit his 73 HRs in 2001. 

Most of the names here won't be surprising--though the "explosion" and its decadent sister tendency of "launch angle" do bring in several that might raise at least one eyebrow (Greg Vaughn, Troy Tulowitzki, Edwin Encarnacion, even Kyle Schwarber). Schwarber gets us to the pure extinction of other extra-base hits, with nothing but HRs--another moment of singular "Starkian ecstasy." (This gang of 27 combined for a total of 427 homers, but only 115 doubles and just 14 triples.)

Note that it's Sammy Sosa who winds up with the current record for most HRs in a month (20). He and Rafael Palmeiro are the first sluggers with 15+ HR months occurring in the same month (August 1999); this feat will be duplicated by J. D. Martinez and Aaron Judge in September-October 2017.

And here's our shout-out to Albert Belle for his two appearances on the list (1995 and 1999)--he is all-too-often overlooked due to his short career. 

WE conclude this installment of "homer porn" with our trademarked TimeGrid™ (it's trademarked because we say so...) depicting all 49 instances of 15+ HR months. 

When might number fifty occur? It could be as early as May 2025: Shohei Ohtani has 10 HRs in 17 games this month, which paces out to 15 or 16 (and it's a month with 31 days, too--something that those Sumimoto sisters are known to live for...too bad for them that Sho-time already has a wife and a dog). 

Now we promise not to write about the long ball in our next post...

CATCHING UP WITH THE MONTHLIES: 10+ HRs IN A MONTH

LAST year we started a series on monthly data--10+ homers in a month--which stalled in the 1990s. (The uptick in the frequency of that feat was frankly a bit flummoxing, plus we had a book of French noir to finish.) 

We'll be getting back to the rest of that series next month, after we cover some other "monthly" events that are unrelated to homers. (We get what they used to call "tired blood" when we are forced to talk about homers all the time...)

So first we'll have monthly doubles, then triples (what a surprise that is!) and we will even get gob-smackingly generic and look at plain old hits before we condescend back into home runs...

EXCEPT for today's post. Here we correct an omission in the 10+ HRs in a month data set by catching you up with all of those incidences in 2024, plus the first three 10+ HR monthly mashers for April 2025. As you'll see there are a couple of names on this list that have a habit of recurring...

WE figure you know which folks we were referred to when we made that last remark...those two homer-hitting behemoths in 2024 who met in the World Series and didn't continue their outsized exploits in what some folks have taken to calling the "Fall Fizzle."

But Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani each had three 10+ HR months last year, with four of the six being real barnburners of a month (as those monthly OPS averages demonstrate). Judge's 14 HRs last May was the highest total in any month during 2024, with Anthony Santander the runner-up with his 13 big flies in June. (Ohtani hit 12 HRs in a month twice--in June and in August--but it was his September that caught folks' imaginations--"only" 10 HRs, but .393 BA for the month plus sixteen stolen bases without being caught as Sho-Time became baseball's first 50-50 player.

August was the big month for 10+ HRs--a total of eight. There were two sets of teammates who hit 10+ HRs in the same month: the A's Brent Rooker and Lawrence Butler did it in July, while Judge and Juan Soto matched the A's duo in August.

WE'VE also tacked on the three 10+ HR achievers for the first month of the 2025 season. Judge had another monster month, hitting over .400 and massing a 1.282 OPS to go with his 10 HRs. Eugenio Suarez tacked on another 10+ HR month despite hitting just .200 in April '25. (He'd hit much better in July '24, with a BA of .333: April '25 was more like the usual Suarez performance: 10 HRs and just six singles for the month.

Ohtani seems to have a jump on another 10+ HR month in May; he's sitting on nine for the month as we type this. Stay tuned...

HOW DO THE BALLPARKS LOOK THUS FAR?

WITH those two minor-league parks entering the scene (and a minor-league roster attempting to fend for itself in Denver), we could be seeing some unusual numbers across the game's thirty parks this season.

Let's take a look at the summary data as of Sunday, May 11:

WE have sorted the data here in descending order of runs per game--remember that average rep the runs per team per game: to get the average number runs scored by both teams, you must remember to multiply by two. 

The range of offense across the parks is exceptionally wide right now: history tells us that there will be a reasonable amount of convergence occurring between now and the end of the season.

WHAT the Orioles did to their pitching staff by moving the left-field fence in (again) might involve a class action suit--that 1.91 HR/G total is beyond surreal. Camden Yards is neck-and-neck with Coors Field when it comes to robust offense.

Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is the polar opposite, with 1968-like offensive levels (3.24 R/G, 0.57 HR/G). 

Another way to put this: so much ballpark bifurcation, so little time...

Meanwhile, the two minor league parks are taking different paths in terms of run scoring. The A's temporary (?) home in West Sacramento is keeping within striking distance of Denver and Baltimore, and the A's pitchers are showing the difference in their performance (8-13, 5.81 ERA at home; 14-7, 3.61 on the road). 

IN Tampa Bay, Steinbrenner Field is shaping up to be a pretty neutral park. The thought was that its cozy Yankee Stadium-like dimensions would bring it in as a homer haven; but their current rate (1.16) is merely above average (it's 1.40 HR/G in the Bronx). 

Note that the color coding is heat-map oriented: extreme above or below average values are shown in blue or yellow-orange respectively. 

Remember that we calculate our park factors differently from the rest of the analytical mob--we calculate using both aggregate park OPS and R/G, then average them together. We like to show the differences in each measure, which is why you have the three figures to look at, with the rightmost column being our "final word" on the subject. 

AND yes, we put the HR/G in red because someone keeps reminding us that chicks dig the long ball. Enjoy it, ladies!

NO RUSH, BUT ROSE (AND SHOELESS JOE) SHOULD BE ABLE TO SAY IT'S SO...

...EXCEPT, of course, they'll never actually be able to do that, for obvious reasons. 

But Rob Manfred's ruling, regardless of any influence provided by Ye Olde Orange Menace--which opens the door for possible induction into the Hall of Fame for Pete Rose, Joe Jackson and sixteen other folks whose names rarely get mentioned*--is the right one...given the circumstances. 

Shoeless Joe Jackson: tragedy.

Baseball has moved into the 21st century's elevated relativism, ethics-wise (and otherwise-wise). It has taken the first step in realizing that it's better to exorcise its ghosts, because by doing so they remove the squidgy echoes that haunt the game's margins. The legalisms that Manfred contorted into his decision were downright annoying, but fortunately the bald logical facts hold: neither Rose nor Jackson are "threats" to the game's "integrity" at this point. 

And while the sport rightfully needs to keep gambling out of the clubhouse, keeping two players out of the Hall of Fame due to those transgressions is not something that requires the same draconian rigor that seemed necessary in the past. Rose and Jackson have been punished by their lifetime bans from the game and from any honors they might have received due to their on-field play. 

NOW it's up to the Hall of Fame's capricious bureaucracy to determine if/when the two men will make it onto a "Veterans' Committee" ballot and then receive a sufficient number of votes for induction.

This same set of rules--a lifetime ban for gambling--should still be a sufficient deterrent to major league players. Since that is still intact, some posthumous mercy can be leavened for the two players in baseball history who truly deserve enshrinement but whose transgressions were sufficiently serious to deny them such an honor while they were still alive.

LET's hope that we won't see some special effort made to expedite this process--it would be unseemly that this matter could accelerate simply because a convicted felon with undue worldly influence whose ethical transgressions dwarf the ill-considered actions of these two players decided to meddle in areas that have nothing to do with affairs of state.

Perhaps this is baseball's way of throwing the "mongrel Menace" a bone to chew on, a kowtow that is more cosmetic than cowardly and cloying. At least we can hope that such is the case.

Pete Rose: farce.

The process can now proceed, but--as noted--there's no rush. Rose and Jackson won't know the difference.

 And the bureaucratic foibles of the Hall should work in favor of a more deliberate pace in rectifying this matter. 

As Jayson Stark noted in his article about the eighteen-player reinstatement, there are ramifications for a group of modern greats who have been blacklisted from the Hall. The limbo those players have experienced for more than a decade will need to be addressed, and it would behoove the Hall to at least start contemplating how they will approach permitting them to appear on Veterans' Committee ballots in the future. (We expect that this won't happen until after Rose and Jackson go through whatever process will emerge.)

DEDICATED readers of BBB probably know that both Rose and Jackson were inducted into the Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals. The Reliquary's exercise of forgiveness exceeded MLB's, since Rose received the honor while he was still alive. While it seemed a bit like grandstanding at the time, it now looks rather prescient in its acknowledgment that, on balance, Rose deserves to be one of a select group of exceptional baseball players accorded special recognition. 

(Of course, the Reliquary enshrined the tragic Jackson first, as they should have. In addition to a lifetime of shame for his murky actions during the maelstrom of the 1919 World Series, Shoeless Joe lost at least five more seasons in a time when offense revved up. Ty Cobb hit .401 in 1922 at age 35, and there's every chance that Jackson would have exceeded .400 again in that environment. )

Our view is that Jackson should be inducted first, with Rose in the following year--but the Vet Committee's bureaucracy will probably make that impossible--all of which provides us with a perfect chance to practice our French: plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. 

ALL in all, an odd victory for two ghosts in a strangely macabre time that continues to swirl around us like a shape-shifting whirlwind. We now must consider a course of action we might call "exorcism by enshrinement": it seems to be the fizzy form of fatalism that we might need to embrace, just as we've learned to turn a blind eye to the more odious phenomenon of "failing upward." Tragedy and farce leer at us in tandem: they raise an eternal shroud over us as we gaze upon their cynical, eternally recurring one-night stand...

--

*Of the sixteen others, the only name worthy of mention in a discussion of the Hall of Fame is Eddie Cicotte, whose numbers get him within whispering distance of Cooperstown. But he's simply just not great enough to deserve dispensation: there are some folk who really do need to stay in their assigned circle of Hell...

JUDGE'S APRIL, "DELTAS" FROM HOT STARTS, & A THEORY ABOUT STEROIDS...

YES, that title is a lot to chew on. We are later with this post than we wanted to be the case--a continuing habit here that we soon open to break--but we'll get a chance to update Aaron Judge's follow-on month (now almost halfway in progress) as we dazzle you with data providing a look at the best offensive opening months in baseball history.

First, just how good was Judge's 2025 April? The sports press certainly has a right to fawn over him--Lord knows we need a distraction from all the distractions that are part of the predatory implosion being force-fed to us. We won't keep you in suspense: measuring April performances from 1969 to the present, and using regular ol' OPS as the measure, Judge's first month in 2025 ranks 32nd all-time. Not quite as earth-shattering as the coverage would have you believe, but highly impressive nonetheless.

BUT what we want to do here is celebrate hot starts over a longer time frame (one circumscribed a bit by the fact that until recently, baseball's April was the "cruelest month" in a way only tangentially related to T. S. Eliot's famous observation: for most of baseball history, April was also the shortest month. (We've used 70 plate appearances as the minimum to qualify for inclusion.)

And we also want to look at what happens to these hot starts by season's end. So we've included the year-end OPS--abbreviated in the charts that follow as OPSey--as an added data column in our look at the Top 100 Aprils for hitters. (As you'll see at the end, the data when averaged into time phases will lead us to a kind of "unified field theory" about the impact of steroids on performance--a thorny topic that, like so much of what happens in the fractious 21st century, could use even a tiny smidge of unification.)

SO here we go. The best Aprils--in keeping with our hard-won reputation for antinomianism--start here, presented in inverse order...

(Hall of Famers shown in bold type: active players shown in red--yes, we think Anthony Rendon is still active...)

As we go along, we will highlight other notable stats: 10+ HRs in April, 30+ RBI, .400+ BA, . 500+ OBP .900+ (!!) SLG. (And there will be a few glitches...we don't want to disappoint the disloyal opposition.)

So it's just under a 1.200 OPS that will get you into the Top 100, and as you might expect it's a mixed bag of big names, journeymen, and flashes-in-the-pan. It's hard to recall, for example, that Aledmys Diaz was ever prized for his hitting, but here's proof that such actually was the case.

Note that deltas (the measure between the April OPS and the OPSey (year-end OPS) are shown in the far right column, and deltas in excess of 30% are bolded, with the greatest delta also done as "code red." Deltas 15% or less are (usually!) bolded and highlighted in a box.

Here in 81-90 land we have neglected to embolden Chipper Jones, who of course is a Hall of Famer.We also see the first instance of a player cranking our so many homers that he makes the list despite hitting less than .300 (no, not Daniel Vogelbach, one of the Tango Love Pie's favorite fetish objects, but Paul Konerko of all people--we promise not to hold it against you. Paul...but will you have any company at all on this list? Stay tuned...)

SO we got carried away and out all of the 30+% deltas in bold red type--it happens. Possibly it occurred because we looked further up the list (even as we look down the list to get to the top...) and saw Pete O'Brien's name again...we wanted to bring that up so that you wouldn't that this, too, was one of the errors to be encountered here.

Note that, in general, the lesser the player in terms of overall career, the greater his delta seems to be. Who says that meritocracy is dead?) But note that Troy Tulowitzki's lower-than-average delta (and we'll share the average with you eventually) is due in part to a season-shortening injury. 

Now that we are comfortably into the 1.200+ OPS territory, it's safe to say that Paul Konerko is the only hitter in the "Top 100 Hot April" list to hit less than .300. 

There are two more Hall of Famers on this list than the three with bolded names, but it may take years for them to get inducted. And note that one of them has the lowest year-end delta we've seen yet.

Please recall that 1971 was the first year that Willie Stargell did not have to play a significant portion of his home games in Forbes Field. (Also recall that he hit 48 HRs that year...)

Closing in on the top fifty! And there's Pete O'Brien again, the first to appear twice on the list. (But note that Luis Gonzalez took umbrage at this and arranged to have side-by-side entries--though the shape of the stats in those two years is diametrically different. Luis' 13 April HRs in '01 matches Ken Griffey Jr.'s output four years earlier. )

We also have the other hot April 2025 that cracked the Top 100 in the unlikely personage of Jorge Polanco...we await his delta with bated (or is that baited?) breath...

And note that it's Fernando Tatis Sr.  having a millennial moment in April 2000, soon followed by a prodigious delta (though not as pronounced as catcher Carson Kelly, who also had a good April this year: we expect another steep decline by season's end). 

How many catchers made it onto the Top 100 list? We count four so far--see if you can spot them. (Note: we are not counting Brian Downing...)

More Hall of Famers who aren't in the Hall--which should remind you about that "theory about steroids" that we teased in the title. And so in 41-50 we have a double order of Big Mac--and look at that insanely low delta between his April 1998 numbers and his OPSey (year-end OPS...you can pronounce it "ohp-see," which is all-too-close to "oopsie," which is what McGwire should have said instead of admitting to using steroids, since it's now clear that candor is no longer refreshing or desirable in the shattered-glass world we live in).

It's a cryin' shame that Brian LaHair (one of those truly great, perverse baseball names...) did not happen to be one of those southern hippie long-hair types. And note that we were so stunned by his BAbip that we forgot to bold it. But at least he (barely) qualified to be on the list--surrounded by three Hall of Famers, only one of whom is actually in the Hall...

Here comes the Judge (and we are not surprised to be the only folk to reference that moldy chestnut in the last 37 years). It excited us so much that we forgot that Bryce Harper is an active player (though his April this year was rather inactive)...and, remaining consistent in our inconsistency, we forgot to embolden Von Hayes' post-April swan dive. (It would be interesting to compute the May-September OPS numbers, but some of these guys might sue us for defamation over deltas that could exceed 50%. 

Note a third Mark McGwire sighting, this one from 1992, before the Offensive Explosion (1993-2009) and the Steroid Era (arguably 1996-2005). Big Mac slugged .800 at a time when only Jose Canseco claims that he was juicing. 

Christian Yelich ups the April HR record to 14, while Rico Petrocelli has tied our main man (Pete O'Brien, for Crissakes!)  for the fewest RBI in a "hot April."

WE move into 1.300 OPS territory as we approach the Top Twenty. Have you been counting the Offensive Explosion years that are on this list? Don't worry, we've got that covered, and you'll see that number a bit later. 

One thing you don't see much on this list are months with a lot of doubles. Jermaine Dye's 12 doubles in April 2000 ties Ivan Rodriguez (#89) for the most we've seen thus far. That's six hot Aprils with 10+ 2Bs so far as opposed to twenty (20) with 10+ HRs. 

In the Top 20 now, and there's another McGwire siting (that makes four...), plus our first glimpse of that other maudit slugger (aka Barry Bonds). We can see why folks got excited about the eternally injured Byron Buxton, the man whom some thought was going to be Aaron Judge. 

Nice to see Reggie Jackson up this high on the list...when Reggie got hot, it was truly scary. Somehow so much of what is now part of the "sub-mental media lexicon" for the longball hoopla that still reigns today seems to stem from Reggie and his exploits with the Yankees. (Note, though, that his #19 showing here comes from a season when was still with the Oakland A's...)

ON into the realm of the 1400 and the luxury penthouse commandeered by Barry Bonds. Note that Bonds hit #2 on this list in 1993, before Larry Walker (and Barry himself) surpassed him and former #1 George Brett (who just barely surpasses the eligibility threshold with his 72 PAs). That strongly suggests that Barry's peak talent had been established prior to whatever he did to "supplement" his performance. 

We'll get to the steroids "thang" shortly. But let's focus on the two 70s holdovers who set the tone for April peak at the dawn of April's acquisition of enough games player to make such comparisons at least semi-meaningful. One could argue that it's Tony Perez' 1970 season (and his record-setting April) that cemented his impression as a Hall of Fame hitter with those "primordial" sportswriters. Ron Cey had shown a bit of a penchant earlier for fast starts and late-season fadeaways--and 1977 was clearly the apex of that pattern: his 44% delta is the biggest of anyone in the Top 100.

Look at Bonds' 2002 to see the exact opposite--a mere 3% drop from April to the OPSey. Tainted as this stretch of Barry' career seems to be (and the appeasement of such a judgment on the part of what has become the "embedded neo-sabe" press is more of a stain on those folk than it is to Bonds...), the level and consistency of this performance makes it at least as impressive as the achievements of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. 

Our view is that 2002 is the greatest of Bonds' four controversial seasons (all of which were, as you might recall, rewarded with MVP awards)--it established a new level of performance that went beyond the record-breaking homer season of 2001 and prompted opposing managers to simply not pitch to him...even with the bases loaded! 

THOUGH consistency is tricky to measure, "delta from early peak" provides an intriguing glimpse into a phenomenon that emerges when we anatomize our Top 100 April hitters across several breakouts (table at left). 

We examine it from the ranked sample of the top 100 first, which establishes its own convergent consistency in the quartile breakout (1-25, 26-50, 51-75, 76-100). The average quartile deltas do not deviate much at all from the overall average decay of just under 24%. There's more deviation when we measure each "tenth" of the sample, but it is not dramatic.

When we look at time ranges, however, we see a greater amount of deviation. The "first divisional era" of expansion (1969-1992) shows a higher delta than any other; it's followed in the time of the "offensive explosion: (1993-2009) with lowest deviation of any segment measured to date. The delta rises again in the years following to the present day (2010-2025) but only about half-way to its 1969-92 level.

AND when we zero in on the most likely period of rampant steroid usage (1996-2005) and calculate the average deltas as show in the bottom three rows, we see that the delta for the "steroid era" portion of the Top 100 is at its lowest aggregate level of all--between 30-35% lower that the deltas for the Top 100 seasons occurring before and after it. 

Now what "theory" can we develop from this narrow slice of data? Simply, this: steroids were more than a "performance boost"--the short-term effects were not the key to their value. What they did is permit longer and more intensely focused exercise workouts, which in turn resulted in increased force--one half of what would ensue 15-20 years later when the "launch angle" component joined with added workouts. For players at or near the top of the spectrum, this produced an increase in consistency that had an additive component to the performance improvement. 

In the steroid era, such players could achieve ~10-15% more overall from combined elements put in play at the time. It's likely that the lion's share of that improvement came from the added consistency that resulted from the overall process. We can see this in the exceptionally low deltas turned by McGwire in 1998 and Bonds in 2002, as well as in the 2001 season of Luis Gonzalez, a hitter whose power surge that year spurred rumors and speculation due to the wildfire of conspiratorial thinking that spread through the media in backlash that reached a fever pitch in 2004-06.

Greater consistency in maintaining peak levels can derive from several sources: the steroid era clustered a series of these in veteran players who extended their performance into years not usually associated with such levels of success. We cannot easily separate the factors contributing to that success, but the overall effect appears to have been relatively modest. That won't silence those whose inflammatory rhetoric has exaggerated the effects of steroids and who have cowed much of the present-day media into keeping Hall of Famers out of Cooperstown. As our dear old Dad used to say: it's a semi-rational world.

LET's end with Aaron Judge, whose #32 slot in the April "peak month" doesn't close the book on the debate over the identity of the "greatest right-handed hitter in baseball history"--but it makes it clear that he cannot be dismissed out of hand, either. Time will tell: we close by noting that after a weekend in the hitter's park that is now the home of the no-town-affiliated A's, baseball's reigning behemoth continues to hit at a blistering pace (two homers on Saturday and 4-for-5 earlier today). 

We're using OPS for our performance measure, and we have the Top 300 slots for each monthly split for hitters going back to 1901, so we can project where Judge's current May 2025 splits would land in terms of the top historical performances. His OPS thus far in May is 1.238: if he were to finish the month with that number, it would rank 58th all-time for the month. (There are four players at the top of the list for May whose OPS is in excess of 1.500--two of them are Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds. We'll wait 'til the end of the month to tell you the names of the other two. One of them, however, is a right-handed hitter. Stay tuned...)